In this podcast Vid Byanna, executive director of Accenture's internal IT infrastructure, talks about his company's collaborative computing, and cloud computing initiatives.

Each day the 177,000 employees at Accenture, a $19 billion global IT services company, must communicate effectively with 1,000 of customers in more than 120 countries. In fact, Accenture executives often find themselves looking for internal experts who can support specific customer engagements.  The traditional process has involved emailing one's network of colleagues to help with the search. Now these executives can use Accenture People, an internal version of LinkedIn, to search the company's global network of employees.

Accenture People comprises Accenture Collaboration 2.0, a global set of technology initiatives to improve knowledge sharing, enhance communication, and allow for dynamic collaboration within the organization. Technologies in this collaboration platform include social networking applications, greater search functionality, telepresence, and unified communications.

Vid Byanna, the executive director for Accenture's internal IT infrastructure capabilitities and Web 3.0 initiatives, says that Accenture Collaboration 2.0 allows employees quickly to get access to the information from experts who can help resolve an issue, or kick start things that deliver value to customers better than through traditional methods. For example, 30 minutes after looking in Accenture People, an employee was holding a telepresence session with an Accenture expert on digital media communications."

Meanwhile, with the help of the Accenture Cloud Opportunity Assessment Tools, the internal IT Accenture organization also has developed a cloud computing strategy. It consists of both internal and external cloud computing initiatives. He says, "We think of cloud computing as dynamic resource allocation of computing capacity, storage and other resources. It gives us the ability quickly to provide these resources for peaks and valleys in IT resource demand. We have heavily invested in our internal cloud by consolidating all of our business applications in a single data center. We also have virtualized our servers, databases, and storage. We are now looking at what external cloud providers can give us. Will these services supplement what we have, or will they give some more scale capabilities?"

In this Enterpriseleadership.org podcast, Byanna talks about the following:

• the catalysts for Accenture Collaboration 2.0 platform,
• the key technologies that comprise this platform,
• the different ways Accenture plans to extend its internal collaboration initiatives to partners and customers,
• the Accenture cloud computing strategy,
• and the benefits the company plans to derive from cloud computing.

Bio

Vid Byanna is the executive director for Accenture's internal IT infrastructure capabilities. He reports to Frank Modruson, Accenture's CIO. Byanna also drives the implementation of IT products and services to support the company's mergers and acquisitions organization.

Before stepping into his current role, he held other IT leadership position in Accenture's CIO organization. From 1989 and 1998, Byanna was part of the company's communications and high-tech operating group, where he directed large solution-oriented projects for global telecommunications providers.

Byanna received a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana, and a M.S. in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology. Before joining Accenture, he worked at Bell Laboratories.

Resources

Accentures Topples Communicatons Barriers, InfoWorld

http://www.infoworld.com/d/networking/accenture-topples-communication-barriers-745

http://www.accenture.com/Global/Services/CIO/LeveragingNeeds.htm

Production Credits

Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer

Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer